IT Courses Online:Time-Saving Keyboard Shortcuts

Everyone remembers Steve Jobs (1955-2011), the American entrepreneur and inventor who was the co-founder of one of the biggest multinational companies in the world, Apple.

As a pioneer of personal computers, digital music players, smartphones, and tablets, the CEO of Apple, a director at Pixar, and a member of Disney’s board of directors, the announcement of his death in 2011 moved millions of people across the planet.

Alongside Steve Wozniak (b. 1950) and Ronald Wayne (b. 1934), he became a powerful economic figure and one of the richest men in the world. They founded Apple in 1976 and made the first Macintosh computer in 1984. This was one of the first computers to make use of a mouse-based interface.

Forty years later, in 2017, the group’s market capitalisation passed $900 billion which is larger than the GDP of the Netherlands. There are currently two multinationals that dominate the market: Apple and Microsoft.

For many users, whether they use a Macbook Pro or Macbook Air with Mac OSX, Apple computers are better than Windows computers. Apple computers have several advantages:

A fluid work area.

Better usability and seamless navigation between folders

Fewer bugs

You’ll save a lot of time throughout a whole day with shortcuts. (Source: Math)

Do you want to save time when opening a dialogue box, using menu bars, task bars, navigating the settings, switching between windows, copying and pasting, or editing texts without having to move the cursor?

Who knows how to open the Task Manager without pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete or how to change the keyboard language?

What about the Mac shortcut keys, though? Did you know you can navigate with the arrow keys?

There are plenty of keyboard shortcuts, but you’ll need to learn the keys on a Mac keyboard layout. After all, you probably noticed that in addition to the letters, numbers, and the spacebar, your computer keyboard has a myriad of function keys that can be used to navigate menus and perform commands.

Why Should You Use Mac Keyboard Shortcuts?

Computers are now a part of our daily lives. Who doesn’t have a personal computer or tablet?

You’ll not have to stay late if you get all your work done. (Source: Aphiwat Chuangchoem)

The digital revolution and web 2.0 technologies mean that computer technologies, computers, tablets, and smartphones, need to go faster and faster. The goal? To send and receive data all over the planet as quickly as possible.

Everything needs to be quick or instant nowadays. While you can create a new document with just a few key presses, most people use several clicks. Before you get your first private IT tutorials, here are some of the best reasons to use Macbook keyboard shortcuts.

Saving Time:

A keyboard short cut is simply using several keys at once to carry out an action rather than using the mouse.

This means you won’t have to right click to fix an error or open a menu, add a file by dragging it from one window to another, right clicking then left clicking to choose an action, or even having to search for a command in the taskbar.

This could be useful for actions like:

Saving

Closing the main window

Deleting a line in a word processor

Editing photos in Adobe Photoshop or Indesign, for example.

There’s a range of daily operations that we carry out that have keyboard shortcuts can save you so much time. Constantly moving between the keyboard and your mouse with your right hand can be a pain.

When Something Goes Wrong

How can you navigate if your wireless mouse, wheel, trackpad, touchpad, or number pad, stops working. Here’s a quick IT tutorial…

It can be a pain when you’re working and the battery in your wireless mouse suddenly dies. (Source: pixabay.com)

You can use keyboard shortcuts to open files, explore files, change system preference, and navigate. For example, just by pressing Command-S, you can save your work without touching you mouse.

So how can you learn keyboard shortcuts for personal computers or laptops? By using them regularly.

You could always make a note of common ones and keep them on a notepad next to your iMac or Macbook Pro. Generally, the operating system shows these actions and their shortcuts when you right-click.

There are difficult combinations to remember (like those for accents on both lower and upper case characters). Just open the list of special characters or change your keyboard settings to manually define useful shortcuts.

The 10 Best Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

Learning more about typing with an Apple or Windows keyboard can’t be done by clicking your fingers. It can be really important to save time whether you’re an editor, developer, or IT technician.

Here are some of the most important Mac keyboard shortcuts:

Copying, Pasting, and Cutting

Let’s start with some of the most common shortcuts used by any computer user whether they’re using Windows or Mac. Instead of Mac’s command key, most computers have a Windows button. However, Windows shortcuts tend to use the ctrl key rather than the Windows key.

You should learn where every key is off by heart. (Source: Jess Watters)

It couldn’t be simpler: select the text you want to copy and hold down the left button on our mouse and drag the cursor to the right or to the left to highlight the word. You can also do this by holding the shift key and using the arrow keys.

Then press the Command (⌘) button and the “C” button at the same time. While you’ll not see anything happen, when you press ⌘ + C, the computer will save the text you highlighted.

Then you just need to scroll to where you want to put the text and press the Command button and “V”. Cmd + V. This command will paste what you copied. Put simply, pasting is just an easy way to insert text from the clipboard (where copied and cut text is stored). To cut (remove the text you’re copying), you just have to press Cmd + X.

Select All

To avoid having to select each individual sentence and word, you can avoid having to right click and choosing Select All, there’s a simple keyboard shortcut you can use: Cmd + A.

This command can help you save a lot of time as it selects all the text. Subsequently, you can use Cmd + A with Cmd + C and Cmd + V like a digital gymnast to quickly copy and paste all the text on a page or in a document. You can also use this for quickly formatting all your text. If you want to underline everything or change the font, Cmd + a is the way to go!

Searching

Another frequently used resource is a the search tool. When reading long lists, we can often lose where we were, struggle to find the important information, or see how many times something appears.

By typing Cmd + F, you can find a given word. Remember that in most cases, Cmd + F searches for exact matches, it won’t find a word that’s been incorrectly typed.

Undo or Cancel an Action

Whether you make a simple mistake or delete all the text in a document, you needn’t worry about it as you can undo actions with just a keyboard shortcut.

By pressing Cmd + Z (ctrl + z is the shortcut on Windows), you can undo the previous action (whether it was intentional or not). If you’ve been playing around with “select all” and you’ve hit backspace or delete, don’t panic, you can just do a quick Cmd + z and your text will come back. A lot of programmes like Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint can undo multiple actions so pressing Cmd + z can undo several consecutive mistakes, too.

Taking an IT class can help you learn and practise these shortcuts – or if you live far away from learning centres or aren’t mobile, you can also take online computer courses.

Saving

Sometimes, programmes and platforms regularly autosave. However, this isn’t always the case. If you’re worried about your computer crashing or losing your data (even on Mac), there’s a quick shortcut to ensure your work is safe and sound.

Pressing Cmd + S allows you to save your document.

Printing

To save a lot of time, there are two buttons you have to press to send the order to the printer. You just have to press Cmd + P: Think of it like “command” + “print”.

Invert Colours

Macs are famous for how often they make use of the colour white, which can be off-putting. To avoid this, you can invert the colours. Additionally, black screens are far more ecological as they use less energy.

The command to do this is Ctrl + Alt + Cmd + 8.

Adjusting the Volume

When changing the volume with the keyboard, you can adjust the volume by the smallest increments possible. By pressing Alt + Shift + plus or minus, you can alter the volume by a quarter at a time. You can also use this to increase the brightness on screen.

While you don’t need a mixing desk, it can be nice to have a little more control over your system volume. (Source: pixabay.com)

Forcing a Restart

Has something gone wrong? Has your mac crashed?

You can force your computer to restart by pressing Ctrl + Cmd + Power Button.

Sleep

If you need to move away from your computer for a bit, you needn’t turn the computer off. If a programme is currently running, you can always put your computer to sleep by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Power Button.

Enthusiastic users can also find lists of keyboard shortcuts. Don’t forget that Windows also has these shortcuts (though some of them are slightly different).

Here’s a quick bonus. You can optimise your active programme settings on startup to free up RAM. Go to your system preferences where you can check and uncheck which programmes you’ll need on startup.

Find out more on private tutorials for beginners!

Share

Joseph

Joseph is a French and Spanish to English translator, language enthusiast, and blogger.